Save Article

The GOP’s Political Budget Scorekeeping

The House is using ‘dynamic’ scoring for tax cuts but not for spending. Is consistency too difficult?

By

Alan S. Blinder

March 12, 2015 8:10 p.m. ET

Tax cuts have been the lodestar of Republican economic policy ever since the Reagan revolution. The central tenet of supply-side economics is that lower marginal tax rates reduce the disincentive effects of taxation, thereby augmenting the economy’s capacity to produce.

That’s mostly right. But in August 1981, when the doctrine got its initial tryout in the first Reagan budget, the University of Chicago’s Robert E. Lucas, Jr., asked a pertinent question in a New York Times op-ed piece: “Is the general principle being...